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Metropolis POV

This blog post was originally written for Metropolis POV.
How many times in the last week, or even in the last day, have you looked at your smart phone, iPad, car, television, some type of technology, and said, “I love you”?

We often treat machines as if they are living things, sometimes with tender loving care, and sometimes with a good swat. But why react so strongly towards inanimate objects?

We humans have an inherent desire, an urge to affiliate with other living forms, a bond called the biophilia hypothesis. This urge to bond with other living things might explain why we respond to our technologies with so much emotion as well as why we’re obsessed with creating life-like technology; the more alive it seems, the greater the potential for love.

Living things not only inspire love, they also inspire knowledge, and life can even do work for us. This year at Greenbuild, you can tour a machine that looks to life for inspiration, and to how living things can help human life. Called the Living Machine, it is a system for treating wastewater at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission building.

“The Living Machine system incorporates a series of wetland cells, or basins, filled with special gravel that promotes the development of micro-ecosystems. As water moves through the system, the cells are alternately flooded and drained to create multiple tidal cycles each day, much like we find in nature, resulting in high quality reusable water,” –Living Machine

Considered by some to be a nuisance tree, Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), which grows across most of the US, may be an important resource in the near future; it could be the sustainable replacement to rainforest hardwoods.

We love the waterfront. It’s a great place to walk the dog, stroll with your love, and work up a sweat. And for about as long as New Yorkers have lived on the water’s edge, there have been ideas on how to make ours a city of the sea.

This past Wednesday evening, the 2012 ONE PRIZE design competition, organized by TERREFORM1, announced their winners, teams who came up with new visions for the waters of New York and how those ideas might create a Sixth Borough. At the AIA Center for Architecture on Laguardia Place, we learned the names of the winning team, and three honorable mentions. And while the exhibit is not particularly engaging, all the information from the winning teams and also (at this time) the semi-finalists can be examined online with high resolution PDF downloads.